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Some Early Baptist Confessions of Faith Explicitly Disowned the "Openness" View

The Second London Confession of Baptists in 1677
(reissued in 1689), in Chapter II, "Of God and the Holy Trinity,"
paragraph 2, says:

"In [God's] sight all things are open and manifest, his
knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the
Creature, so as nothing is to him contingent, or
uncertain."1

It is remarkable that three hundred years ago Baptists
explicitly repudiated an essential tenet of contemporary "openness
theology"; namely, that God's knowledge is indeed significantly
"dependent upon the Creature." As Greg Boyd says, "God can't
foreknow the good or bad decisions of the people He creates until
He creates these people and they, in turn create their
decisions."2 This "openness" view entails that for God
many things are indeed "contingent or uncertain," which the
Baptists of 1689 also reject in their statement of faith.

Why did a Baptist confession of faith in 1689 include such an
explicit denial of these "openness" tenets? One reason is that
"Socinian thought became predominant in many circles, both General
Baptist and English Presbyterians being widely
contaminated."3 But all orthodox branches of the church
rejected this doctrinal aberration and affirmed God's exhaustive
foreknowledge. Charles Hodge expresses this common knowledge, "The
Church . . . in obedience to the Scriptures, has, almost with one
voice, professed faith in God's foreknowledge of the free acts of
his creatures."4 Greg Boyd acknowledges that "Until the
time of the Socinians, the belief that God's omniscience included
all future events was not generally questioned."5

But the Socinians, taking the name of Socinus (1539-1604),
avowed a view of God's foreknowledge similar to the one being
advanced by openness theology today.The Socinians . . . unable to
reconcile this foreknowledge with human liberty, deny that free
acts can be foreknown. As the omnipotence of God is his ability to
do whatever is possible, so his omniscience is his knowledge of
everything knowable. But as free acts are in their nature
uncertain, as they may or may not be, they cannot be known before
they occur. Such is the argument of Socinus.6

Therefore, the Baptists in 1689, when confronted with the
spreading of this false teaching about the foreknowledge of God,
were moved to take an explicit stand against it in their
affirmation of faith.

The issue remained important enough for the next 60 years, so
that when the Baptists in America chose their first affirmation of
faith, they chose this same 1689 London Confession. They
made some small additions relevant to their situation, but left the
wording on foreknowledge exactly as it was in the 1689
Confession.

In 1707 the first Baptist association in America was organized
at Philadelphia. As theological disputes arose among the Baptists
of the New World, they appealed to "the Confession of Faith, set by
the elders and brethren met in London in 1689, and owned by us," as
their standard of doctrine. When the association gathered at
Philadelphia on September 25, 1742, they ordered a new printing of
this by then classic statement of faith which became known on this
side of the Atlantic as the Philadelphia Confession of
Faith.7

Thus, in this first American Baptist statement of faith, the
explicit disavowal of limited foreknowledge was preserved in the
same language. "In [God's] sight all things are open and manifest,
his knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the
Creature, so as nothing is to him contingent, or
uncertain."8 We may infer several lessons from these
observations:

1. The view of God's foreknowledge espoused today by openness
theology is similar to that espoused by Socinianism, even though
not all of the unorthodox views of Socinianism are embraced by
openness theology.9

2. The limited view of God's foreknowledge was rejected by all
orthodox bodies in the history of the church including our Baptist
forefathers.

3. This doctrinal issue was regarded by seventeenth-century
Baptists as important enough in their day to repudiate explicitly
in their affirmation of faith.

4. It is not unbaptistic or narrow to do the same today.

1William L. Lumkin, ed., Baptist Confessions of
Faith (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1959), p. 253 (emphasis
added). The fact that these early Baptists were Calvinistic in
their orientation does not mean that the issue of foreknowledge was
a uniquely Calvinisitc concern. Arminius himself rejected the
notion that his view demanded God's uncertainty about future human
choices. He affirmed, for example, "The fourth decree, to save
certain particular persons and to damn others . . . rests upon the
foreknowledge of God, by which he has known from eternity which
persons should believe according to such an administration of the
means serving to repentance and faith through his preceding grace
and which should persevere through subsequent grace, and also who
should not believe and persevere." Quoted in Carl Bangs,
Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville:
Abingdon, 1971), p. 352.

9 Nevertheless, we should hear the
warning of Robert Strimple in response to openness theology: "A
Socinian view of God leads inevitably to a Socinian view of
salvation, which is not the good news of salvation by God's free
grace - by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to
the glory of God alone - but rather a message of salvation by one's
own efforts, a false gospel that is not good news at all. It is the
gospel that is at stake in this debate." "What Does God Know?" in:
The Coming Evangelical Crisis, John Armstrong, ed.
(Chicago: Moody Press, 1996), p. 150.

John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books.

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